Collision Components

In UE4, there are two types of components that can affect and be affected by collision; they are as follows:

• Meshes
• Shape objects

Meshes can be as simple as a cube, or as complex as a high-resolution character with tens of thousands of vertices. A mesh's collision can be specified with a custom file imported alongside the mesh into UE4 (which is outside the scope of this book), or it can be calculated automatically by UE4 and customized by you.

It is generally a good practice to keep the collision mesh as simple (few triangles) as possible so that the physics engine can efficiently calculate collision at runtime. The types of meshes that can have collision are as follows:

• Static Meshes
• Skeletal Meshes
• Procedural Meshes
• And so on

Shape objects, which are simple meshes represented in wireframe mode that are used to behave as collision objects by causing and receiving collision events.

Note

Wireframe mode...